Final Thoughts
Final Thoughts
Written by John Packard
September 19, 2014
For those who are keeping track I will be in Arkansas tomorrow for the Big River Steel groundbreaking. It will be interesting to see for myself what all the fuss is about… More about the groundbreaking (and maybe some of the fuss) in Tuesday evening’s issue of SMU.
We have also been working on a special report on zinc as we believe the subject will be of keen interest to those of you who are buying galvanized, galvannealed, galfan or other coated products which use zinc to coat hot rolled or cold rolled substrate. We have warned our readers in the past that zinc pricing bears watching in the coming months.
We still have a couple of seats left for our next Steel 101 workshop which will be held in Ft. Wayne, IN on October 7 & 8. We will tour the SDI Butler, IN steel mill as part of our program. You can find our program, pricing and how to register on our website or, you are welcome to contact our offices at: 800-432-3475. We will close registration at the end of this week and start working on our next Steel 101 program which will be held in late January in South Carolina and will include a tour of the Nucor Berkeley steel mill.
I want to thank all of the steel mills who have worked with Steel Market Update and have allowed our Steel 101 training workshop to tour their facilities: NLMK USA, Severstal (both Dearborn – now AK Steel and Columbus – now SDI), SSAB, California Steel, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, Steel Dynamics and Nucor. We hope other mills will consider working with Steel Market Update and our educational program(s) in the future. I
I am going to keep it short this evening. Thank you again for your business which is truly appreciated by all of us at Steel Market Update.
John Packard
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Final Thoughts
I’m trying to make sure this is not a TL;DR Final Thoughts. As a journalism school professor once told me, ‘No one but your mom reads more than 1,000 words.’ Also, as the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand as well. With that in mind, below are a couple of charts that I think go a long way toward explaining how prices and lead times have been relatively stable despite concerns about demand.
Final Thoughts
It’s another week of big headlines for the world writ large – an expanding war in the Middle East, another potentially catastrophic hurricane – and not much going on in the world of steel prices. “Call me Stevie Wonder, I see nothing.” That’s how one service center executive described the current sheet market. There seems to be almost a competition among some of our Community Chat guests and contributors to outdo each other in flowery ways to say, “
Final Thoughts
Surprise, surprise. Forget Halloween, the trend this October is all around the unexpected. Known as the “October Surprise,” you never know what is in store for you in the month before a US presidential election. Still, if we pull back the dial back date-wise a little bit, a familiar theme has been added to the mix: kick the can.
Final Thoughts
Another day, another massive gap between the news and market sentiment. On the news side, we’ve got war in the Middle East. The devastation facing western North Carolina coming into tragic focus. And the outcome of the presidential election remains a coin toss, according to current polling.
Final thoughts
There are markets where the headlines and the prices are both crazy. This does not appear to be one of them, at least not yet.